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The rear part of your dog springs into action every time they need to stand up, move forward, hop into the car, or ascend stairs.
In sports, the dog’s rear end is crucial for delivering the jumping power, speed, and quick starts required for darting after a frisbee or clearing obstacles in agility or flyball competitions.
And as much as it is engaged in all sorts of different motions, it’s also quite prone to injuries.
By strengthening the muscles in your dog’s hind legs —namely the quadriceps, glutes, and hamstrings—you can not only improve dogs’ sports performance by boosting their acceleration and takeoff power but also support the overall well-being of older dogs, making everyday activities like riding, walking, or stair climbing easier.
Working on strengthening stabilizer muscles of the pelvic limbs can provide great support also to joints, especially to the hips and stifle (knee joint).
Once we learned what is a proper neutral position in the Front Feet (FF) Up exercise deeply explained in the Know-how for dog fitness blog post, we can use this skill to now deliberately switch between different head positions with the help of reward / target to provide some extra muscle work!
Let’s take a look at how we can challenge a dog’s rear end musculature more with a simple change of reward up and down.
Let’s take a look at how we can challenge a dog’s rear end musculature more with a simple change of reward up and down.
Using height elevation (front feet up position) will increase weight bearing in the hind limbs.
When in a nice and balanced standing position, we will lure the dog with a cookie or ask for a nose touch to target to turn the head slightly up, and slightly down.
By doing so, the dog will shift weight back and forth, which will induce alternating isometric contracting and relaxing of the opposite muscle groups, especially in the hind limbs due to the height elevation. This will provide strengthening to quads, hamstrings, glutes and gastrocnemius, as well as challenge the dog’s core.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR WHEN PERFORMING THIS DOG FITNESS EXERCISE:
A cool trick with these different rewarding spots, isn’t it?
While having the dog’s front end elevated, we can also dynamically engage hind limbs, and work the muscles through active elongations and contractions. For this, we can do some position changes, such as Down to Stands!
There are a few things you should keep in mind when you’re performing down-to-stand dog fitness exercises:
Starting out of a nice and balanced FF up position
The dog should fold into a down in a controlled manner, all four feet should stay on the same spot
Powerful but controlled lift back up to the stand, again keeping all four feet stationary
Important: pay attention the dog is ending in a proper down position with knees and hocks in good flexion, and close to the body.
NEED A CONDITIONING WORKOUT SUGGESTION?
Performing 5-10 repetitions of down to stands in a row, completed over 2 or 3 sets, can already make a nice workout for the dog’s knees, hocks, and whole hind end musculature!
So, why not take advantage of gained knowledge about height elevations and incorporate it into your workout routines
Want to learn more about the importance of the dog’s front end exercises? Read this post.
Need more info about the dog’s core? Then read this one.
Seize this opportunity and take a look inside our most popular online course!
COMES WITH 12 EXERCISES AND LESSONS & covers topics like:
➜ Bony Landmarks – Get to Know Your Dog
➜ The Core – Center of Gravity
➜ Introduction to the Skill Room
➜ Starting Points – Front Feet Up
➜ The Cavaletti Exercise
➜ Walking backwards
➜ Workout: Rear + Core
➜ Resting day
